Being wanting to use GhostBSD for some years now (certainly since I first tried 4.0 when it was the ONLY *nix that would run on an ancient machine I had lying around.)

FF to today, I'm trying to get rid of Ubuntu because much as love GNU, I can't be doing with Linus and the idea that he's some sort of god.

So, I boot the installer and no matter which menu option I chose, the screen goes blank as soon as the video driver loads. I can get the main loader up with or without "vesa only" but it breaks pretty quickly. If it's relevant, the machine has an EFI loader but Ghost is only offering the traditional boot.

I'm fairly sure this is down to the support (or lack of) for the Pascal architecture in the 1060 although I'm assured that IF you can get the nVidia driver loaded after install, you're golden. I don't even need CUDA (although that's helpful) since my rendering work is often CPU-based and I have enough horsepower to virtually match CUDA on the 1060.

That's terrific news. I got 10.3 and 11.1 running on an aging Dell X1730 gaming laptop - which is all fur coat and no knickers - marrying a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo with dual 980GTXs in SLI mode. Hard to imagine why anyone thought that was a good idea. You won't be surprised that it also chokes under the weight and came to me with a laundry list of physical hardware faults. Seriously, the hardware design is so bad that the standing temperature of the GPUs fluctuates from 65 C to 74C and back again as the two fans stop and start in a never-ending cycle. No wonder the the BGA failed - and that's only the start of it!

I have a working U*untu (cough, cough) system which is OK for now but I'd really prefer Ghost as my daily driver for reasons I've already stated. Also, ZFS is probably going to reduces the wear on my SSD unless TRIM support is incorporated but this is something for a different post.

This install is for my workstation which is a beast compared to everything I've ever owned: twin 8 core Xeons with for a total of 32 cores (16 real, 16 virtualised) and 32Gb of RAM. My reading of ZFS is that it needs about 1 Gb RAM for every 1 Tb of HDD space, so I'm lucky enough to be well covered.

The Dell had plenty of RAM too 4 Gb for a 200Gb drive (I don't know how ZFS scales) but that's the least of its problems even after I'd oven baked the dual GTX980 at 200 C / 390 F / Gas 6... for 10 minutes (yes, it actually works on this card!). However, some gooba has managed to partially crack the power lead just north of the cable stress reducer (a lot of good that did) and the brick itself has burned out the little memory cell that tells the laptop what sort of charger is fitted. Honestly, this thing is a litany of bad design decisions only mirrored by Microsoft when it dropped the XBox 360s with precisely the same fault on its BGA GFX chip.

But really, what soft of idiot thought that marrying a modest dual-core CPU to a pair of what would likely have been the fastest GPUs available to the public is beyond me. They even sold it with 32 bit Vista despite outfitting it with 4Gb RAM. Although I can see some sense in that decision since the 32 bit OS would be better supported.

Roll on RC3 and I can dump Torvalds... sorry to sound so negative but he really has let his fame go to his head and he's starting to believe his own press these days. Without the work of GNU, there wouldn't be an operating system to wrap around his kernel.

Nice specs for your machine! That's certainly a fun system to work with. Just wanted to point out that ZFS has no native TRIM support but that's coming. However for FreeBSD/GhostBSD this is not a problem because we do have TRIM support for ZFS already (the native implementation is assumed to be a litte more efficient, though). Also ZFS scales extremely well in just about any case you may have for it. Originally it stood for "the Zettabyte Filesystem" after all!

But it is true that it can be quite a bit of a memory hog. The rule of thumb 2GB + 1GB for each TB of storage is probably a good one. Please do mind however that this changes massively if you decide to use a feature like de-duplication! I can only advice you to stay away of that. I had a box with 16 GB RAM and thought that should be plenty and enabled dedupe. That was a bad mistake - not even because of memory concerns. But deleting large files brought the whole machine to its knees and made everything crawl. So badly in fact that the machine was unusable while it was deleting. And the deletion process could take many minutes. Don't repeat my mistake or you may end up hating ZFS (which would be a shame ).

Just another reason to jump to Ghost! I didn't know that ZFS meant that - you learn something every day (and I've been doing this for nearly four decades now!) I'll certainly be taking your advice on the de-duplication fiasco! in fact, my local store for mission critical files is quite modest - 120 gB SSD - which is lean but quite sufficient. All the production and backups goes straight to more traditional drives: but my fear (and experience) is that it's usually the primary, pre-backup that gets hit during an outage, crash, etc. This is where ZFS comes into its own, for me anywhere. Journalling never seemed to live up to the promises made of it.

I got this machine when my Mac (under two years old) decided it was going to take its ball and go home... long story but it really was hardly used and I wasn't the happiest of bears as you might imagine. My 20+ year old Chinese made oscilloscope which I still occasionally need still works - the week I'm having though, I probably just nixed that too.

I'm something of a recycler - most of my machines are refurbs/recons and several are donations which is why I'm big into the GNU+Linux and BSD scene. I donate my old ones to people in greater need and GNU/BSD is usually a far better bet unless folks need things like iTunes and we all know what that means, right?

This particular beast came by way of these guys in England ( http://www.bargainhardware.co.uk/ ) and I can heartily recommend them the machines are obviously used and many come from data centers, etc. but considering what I paid for this it's an absolute beast. I honestly don't care if the case has the odd nick and scratch, it's a workhorse!

When the piggy bank allows, I'll certainly be getting one or two more similar machines to make a small render farm.

I love this idea of copy-on-write though - it's such a shame we can't get it for pico-servers like the Raspberry PI which powers my DietPi-powered backup system. It's a trade off, I know, but having a backup online 24/7 that doesn't cost me a new PC every year in running costs is good for me and great for the environment.